Why Winnipeg's Transit System Revived the Old-Timey Token

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Why Winnipeg's Transit System Revived the Old-Timey Token

Nik Thavisione

The order felt huge to Winnipeg Transit, and tiny to the Royal Canadian Mint. The Ottawa-based coining operation—its shares still held in trust for Her Majesty the Queen—churned out 350 million coins for countries like Botswana, Indonesia, Panama, and Canada last year. Winnipeg wanted 600,000.

The weird part, though, was the substance of the order. As transportation agencies around the world ditch fare cards you swipe for ones you tap, Winnipeg's going retro, and bringing back the lowly token.

Well, at least for two groups of riders: people who receive as-needed fares through social service agencies, and kids who get them through school. The rest of the system's 170,000 daily riders are hopping the train to the 21st century, swapping paper tickets for a new electronic, tappable "Peggo card" introduced earlier this year.

Temporary electronic cards for social agency users and kids might get lost or stolen, officials figured, but they still wanted to get away from the old way of doing things.

"From an environmental perspective, we really liked the idea of not having any more paper tickets," says Jonathan Borland, the city’s transit information supervisor. "We needed to develop something that was fairly low cost [and that] we could stock in large numbers." Whereas launching temporary electronic cards for these riders would cost about $800,000, Winnipeg can get its 600,000 tokens for less than $300,000—and they're expected to last for about 20 years.

So the token made its comeback.

2016’s Token

Designing a modern token is harder than you'd think. Winnipeg’s transit coins have to be easily distinguishable from Canadian money, by sight and by touch. The full fare tokens, for adult riders, are plated with copper and brass. The youth fares, for kiddos 6 to 17, sub nickel for copper. They’re both smaller than a Canadian quarter, for easy pocket-fishing.

Then there’s the tricky security measures. The tokens have a unique electro-magnetic signature made up of eight parameters—things like exact thickness, diameter, and composition. (This is standard coin security, says the Royal Canadian Mint.) If someone wanted to go about counterfeiting these things—like “a guy in a garage out back,” says Borland—they’d have to get all eight right.

The hardest job, Borland says, was programming the fare boxes to accept the newfangled metal pieces, since tokens get chucked in the same slot as regular coins. (Winnipeg still lets passengers pay with cash.) So the transit agency reengineered the fare boxes to distinguish between the electro-magnetic signatures of random hunks of metal, Loonies and Toonies, a Botswanan thebe, and the real deal.

The Fairest Fare

In that respect, Winnipeg’s fare challenge is not so different from those of other transit agencies: slogging its way through modernization efforts while dragging the dead weight of bureaucracy. Philadelphia—where 22 percent of riders still use outdated tokens—has been trying to transfer to the all-electronic Key card since 2007, but there’s still no timeframe for the switch. The delay? Years-long wrestling with software and code.

Just an Amtrak ride away, New York is also groaning its way through payment modernization. The city finally, finally put out a request for bids for a contactless payment system last spring. (That's the kind of smartphone-driven tech London’s had since 2012.) But don’t actually expect a new Big Apple fare payment system until 2021—at the earliest.

Back up in the Great White North, Winnipeg is looking for some recognition for its innovative approaches. “We’re the Rodney Dangerfield of Canada,” says Borland, the transportation official—oft-overshadowed by the big city systems in Toronto and Montreal. Now Winnipeg has tokens, and tokens should work for Winnipeg. Give it some respect.

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